• Get involved.
    We want your input!
    Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.

    After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
    If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.

    After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
    https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/

    Thanks in advance and have fun!
    RadioDiscussions Administrators

Will local broadcast TV eventually go the way of local radio?

M

Mike_JT

Here’s a question that I’ve drawn from several different threads and Pay TV seemed the logical place to go with it. It might be an old question, but I’m a new member and have thought about this for a while:

Will local broadcast TV eventually go the way of local radio? That is, will it die a slow death?

The article on Sinclair’s proposed RSN service brought me back to it. If it is true that their potential streaming service would “dramatically reshape…what’s left of the cable bundle and broadcast TV, too,” where will anything local come from? Local stations are not a significant part of any streaming service, and younger viewers will not turn away from their phones and back to a TV set. That means fewer HD broadcast viewers and a subsequent loss of advertising - the thing that mortally wounded print journalism. Even local news seems to be driven by the anchor’s dependence on viewer reaction through Twitter, Facebook, and iPhone pics of kittens and natural disasters.

I started at college as a Radio/TV student and ended up in Journalism school. It turned me into an interested broadcast consumer instead of an industry professional. In the print world, I’ve had a couple of papers shot out from under me and hate the consequent loss of local perspective. Now I wonder if my local TV stations are headed down that same dismal road.

Why Sinclair’s $250 Million Sports Streaming Swing Could Deliver a Walk-off Defeat of Pay TV​

Why Sinclair’s $250 Million Sports Streaming Swing Could Deliver a Walk-off Defeat of Pay TV
Click to expand...
 
Mike_JT said:
Here’s a question that I’ve drawn from several different threads and Pay TV seemed the logical place to go with it. It might be an old question, but I’m a new member and have thought about this for a while:

Will local broadcast TV eventually go the way of local radio? That is, will it die a slow death?

The article on Sinclair’s proposed RSN service brought me back to it. If it is true that their potential streaming service would “dramatically reshape…what’s left of the cable bundle and broadcast TV, too,” where will anything local come from? Local stations are not a significant part of any streaming service, and younger viewers will not turn away from their phones and back to a TV set. That means fewer HD broadcast viewers and a subsequent loss of advertising - the thing that mortally wounded print journalism. Even local news seems to be driven by the anchor’s dependence on viewer reaction through Twitter, Facebook, and iPhone pics of kittens and natural disasters.

I started at college as a Radio/TV student and ended up in Journalism school. It turned me into an interested broadcast consumer instead of an industry professional. In the print world, I’ve had a couple of papers shot out from under me and hate the consequent loss of local perspective. Now I wonder if my local TV stations are headed down that same dismal road.
Click to expand...
Not exactly though I knew CBS was making the local CBS owned stations become a part of the CBS News app and Paramount+ app. TV is shifting to apps though. I knew local Fox owned Stations was going to be integrated into the Tubi app.

Nexstar was in the process of forming News Nation and making their O&O's such as KRON and KTLA have a streaming feed.

All I can say is that TV in general has been shifting to appearing on streaming outlets.
 
Personally, I believe broadcast and local TV will be around for the foreseeable future, but I'd wager that most viewers today want to watch what they want, when they want to see it, so streaming is definitely overtaking in popularity. As an example, I haven't watched an episode of SNL in its live time slot for a few years..But if I see a lot of buzz or some great comments about a few particular sketches from a given show, I'll watch just those when I have free time. I don't necessarily want to sit through a 30 minute or hour long local newscast, but I'll go to the stations' website, pick and choose the stories that interest me, and either read or watch those items at my leisure. Same with the Olympic qualifiers and trials that are happening now. I don't have the ability to watch them live during prime time, but will go to Peacock later that night or later in the week and watch the parts I'm most interested in, skipping past the parts I'm not. I've never been a big watcher of movies or "binge watching" series, but obviously tons of people are into that as well, and again, will be happy to watch hours of a particular show sometimes months or longer after the actual air or release date - but they want to do it on their schedule, not when broadcast TV tells them they'll air it.

There will always be a desire for live sporting events, live news as larger stories unfold, etc. and people will always want local news from their immediate area, not just national or international stories. While some are happy to watch on their tablets or phones, that stuff will always be better (IMO) on larger TVs, the question is the delivery platform, as one can obviously stream to a TV as easily as they can pull in an OTA signal or via cable in many cases. The question popping up recently, however, is what it'll all cost. Access to older shows from a given series or program were once free on many websites, but now can require a paid subscription. And with Discovery+, Peacock, Netflix, iTunes, Youtube, Hulu, ESPN, Paramount+ and now Sinclair's RSN's all coming separately and each with an added cost, how much will people really be willing to pay to get all the different services and content they want?
 
Last edited:
How much will people pay for streaming? Or, is it such an addiction that no one cares about costs any more?
 
It does seem like a sea-change is happening in the way we consume local video content. It feels much like the change radio underwent in the 50s after national programs migrated to network TV. Hard to predict where it will all play out in the middle of the transition.

But it does feel like broadcast TV transmitters are increasingly becoming redundant in favor of streaming,
 
joebtsflk1 said:
It does seem like a sea-change is happening in the way we consume local video content. It feels much like the change radio underwent in the 50s after national programs migrated to network TV. Hard to predict where it will all play out in the middle of the transition.

But it does feel like broadcast TV transmitters are increasingly becoming redundant in favor of streaming,
Click to expand...
They were getting redundant in the 80s with cable. TV ceded its distribution system decades ago, now they have to continually retool for first digital, then repack with only a minor portion of the audience receiving off-air
 
And, you'll likely be paying a Cable company for the bandwidth anyway.
 
Phone company here is far too slow. Everybody here seems itching to turn their money, and their data, over to Google Fiber.
Hope the locals get those big raises they are expecting ($15.00/hour). Rents are skyrocketing, too.
 
“Eventually” and “local radio” are very wide open. Eventually…technology changes. Things migrate and evolve. Eventually lots of things will happen.
And there’s plenty of local radio. In some cases, radio is evolving to more of what local TV has been doing for decades. Local blocks in key periods (news) and somewhat uniform syndicated/network content elsewhere.

The broad contours of how say WPVI and WABC have nearly identical syndicated and network lineups interspersed with news and how Audacy for example has set up some of their regional/local content approaches are somewhat cut from the same cloth.
 
Yes, without a question. It will be a while, but the business model currently employed by broadcast TV, which is heavily dependent on cable retrans fees, is already dead.

A survey conducted by the Pew Research Center a few months ago found a decline of about one-fifth in the number of households who subscribe to cable or satellite TV from 2015 to 2021. Adults age 18-30 fell by almost half; adults over 65 fell by only 5 points.

That kind of generational gap means the cable customers who are paying for broadcast TV via retrans fees are becoming fewer and fewer each year as new adults matriculate and older adults cut expenses, move into shared living arrangements or die.

Nexstar, the largest owner of broadcast TV stations in the country, earns about half its revenue from the cable bundle. If this seems like a recipe for problems, you're right.

But it actually gets worse. There is a lot of market pressure for content that has traditionally been behind the "cable bundle" to be freed. CBS now has the rights to stream NFL games through Paramount Plus, and it appears the will do so - bypassing the affiliates. I presume similar rights were granted to Fox as well. That's a huge problem for affiliates, losing exclusivity on key programming, along with what should be smaller audiences to sell advertising against. Other non-sports programming can also now be purchased from the network directly by consumers via Paramount Plus, Disney Plus and similar.

That brings us to Sinclair, who recently bought one of the lynchpins in the cable TV industry with their RSNs. There are a lot of people who primarily subscribe to cable TV because of access to their favorite sports team - I saw one estimate recently that it was roughly 1 in 3 customers. If Sinclair offers their Bally Sports RSNs on streaming, even at $20-$30 a month as rumored, that will remove yet another incentive for people to buy cable TV, which will have ripple effects on everyone who receives carriage fees from the cable bundle. Including Sinclair. It's a tough tightrope for them to walk, especially because the RSNs seem to be having some financial difficulty in the aftermath of Covid.

I have no idea how Nexstar, Sinclair, Gray and others combat the change in the marketplace. I don't think they have any good options. That Pew study I cited above notes that 91% of adults under 30 are satisfied with the programming they can get online. As we know, young people tend to be less interested in news programming, which is the only real exclusive that broadcast TV has.

I personally subscribe to a newspaper (digitally) - there's no way I'd subscribe to a "television" news outlet if they were similarly priced. And I have a station in my market which promotes their digital streaming hard - but there's very little revenue there today, given that most of the commercial breaks are filled with a slate that says "We're in a commercial break, back soon."
 
Thanks for all of your replies. Like I said, I’m an interested consumer and observer and now I have a much clearer understanding of many things. I’m probably the rank sentimentalist that Louie accused Rick of being in “Casablanca.” I enjoyed commercial jingles, goofy local ads and the strange world of community access. Sign-offs always left me with a feeling of being abandoned, even when other stations were still broadcasting. I’ll always miss those things but feel better about understanding the future.

You’ve answered several questions I’ve thought about for a while, such as what happens to the cable providers if everybody cuts the cord. They make up the lost revenue through broadband fees, which will probably shoot sky high.

Thanks RadioPatrol for the Washington Post link. It went to something I’ve struggled with for a while: the loss of broadcast’s cultural community. I taught Mass Comm for and would ask the class - mostly 18 to 23 year olds - about the sense of community that came with everybody sharing a viewing or listening experience at the same time. They were befuddled even by the concept. But I couldn’t criticize that because it wasn’t their experience and they just didn’t understand it.

To kenglish and gr8oldies point, I did quick math on our cable bill. If we subscribed to HBO Max, Disney+, Paramount+, Discovery+ and included $25 for a possible Bally’s service (we already pay for Prime) we’d save just over $20 off the Spectrum cable. We’re hanging on to it because of Bally Southwest. My wife cannot live without her Rangers games, even though they’re so far down this season that it’s painful to watch.

To AbrahamJSimpson’s point, I never really noticed how similar local radio and tv were in their content and scheduling. GMA (Good Morning America) three times a day…

And PTBoardOp94 revealed the mystery behind the long commercial-less breaks on Samsung TV and Pluto. Couldn’t figure out who wanted ad time on a channel running “The Beverly Hillbillies” or “The Love Boat” 24/7.
 
My opinion is broadcast TV is a costly business model. At the point broadcast television becomes unprofitable, licenses will be surrendered or be sold. That will be when the logistics of operation and masses of viewers are using something other than broadcast TV. At one point cable wagged the tail of the dog that was the broadcast signal. It still does at this point.

What I see from a bunch of folks here is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Oh, radio is dead but reaches 90% weekly. Until that number drops to 10-20% radio will hang on. Broadcast TV will continue to work because the masses have not yet gone to other options to receive the signal. For example, someone might say X percent watch online or X percent cut cable. When those numbers become so substantial it makes sense to drop the over the air broadcast, that will happen but I feel, like with radio, it's not anytime soon. I will say it's a growing trend that will reach a tipping point in the future, just not in a few years.
 
b-turner said:
My opinion is broadcast TV is a costly business model. At the point broadcast television becomes unprofitable, licenses will be surrendered or be sold. That will be when the logistics of operation and masses of viewers are using something other than broadcast TV. At one point cable wagged the tail of the dog that was the broadcast signal. It still does at this point.

What I see from a bunch of folks here is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Oh, radio is dead but reaches 90% weekly. Until that number drops to 10-20% radio will hang on. Broadcast TV will continue to work because the masses have not yet gone to other options to receive the signal. For example, someone might say X percent watch online or X percent cut cable. When those numbers become so substantial it makes sense to drop the over the air broadcast, that will happen but I feel, like with radio, it's not anytime soon. I will say it's a growing trend that will reach a tipping point in the future, just not in a few years.
Click to expand...

I know what you mean I saw a clip about Cable TV in the 1970's but Cable didn't have a boom until the 1980's and 1990's when more channels came out. Also Cable would have been seen as a luxury between the 1980's and 1990's if you lived in a TV market where its easy to get lots of OTA signals.
 
I sort of related cable TV versus OTA as the microwave versus the conventional oven. Once you tried the microwave there was no going back. Once you have multiples of actual OTA stations, that many choices made OTA TV not something you wanted to go back to.

I recall Ted Turner opining that the real money in television was in providing programming. He said this about the time he debuted CNN. He said viewers would have hundreds of viewing choices in the future, so the big demand was in providing programming. He was right but I doubt he thought there would be so many stations that the budget for buying programming would diminish greatly. That's why, in my opinion, you have so many reality type shows. A sitcom just costs too much by comparison. I contend that is why so many channels repeat a big movie on their channel over and over or run more than one episode of a show at a time. You can afford only so much based on viewership so repeats make better use of that budget.
 
b-turner said:
Broadcast TV will continue to work because the masses have not yet gone to other options to receive the signal. For example, someone might say X percent watch online or X percent cut cable. When those numbers become so substantial it makes sense to drop the over the air broadcast, that will happen but I feel, like with radio, it's not anytime soon. I will say it's a growing trend that will reach a tipping point in the future, just not in a few years.
Click to expand...

The masses have long ago moved on from broadcast TV, though. According to Nielsen, only one-quarter of all TV viewing now occurs on the broadcast nets: Streaming Barely Surpasses Broadcast-TV Viewing, Nielsen Graphic Shows

And a significant portion of that broadcast viewing is for live events, primarily sports.

There's been a significant decline in broadcast viewership over the last several years. If I'm reading the numbers right, the top rated network in the 18-49 demo scored a 1.8 rating in 2013, and a 1.0 rating in 2021, a decline of 45%.
 
You are correct in over the air viewership, however economically speaking it is worth the cost and Federal regulations to deal with at this point because what what cable pays broadcast TV stations on their cable systems. When that must carry doesn't mean much in viewership and revenue, broadcast TV will become just an online thing.
 
Status
This thread has been closed due to inactivity. You can create a new thread to discuss this topic.


Back
Top Bottom